Vulgata ab Aeterno

 

On the first part of the journey
I was looking at all the life
There were plants and birds and rocks and things
-America

‘I don’t have enough thoughts to fill five hundred years.’
-Katherine Rundell

"How cordial is the mystery!

The hospitable pall

A "this way" beckons spaciously –

A Miracle for all!"

- Emily Dickinson

It's been windy but here I am.  You catch me amidst my dissolution.  It's a process. Mind you, I still go bravely about my business, snatching at the familiar clutches of tedium. Traffic on the freeway, bills to pay, feeding the cat's leftovers to the birds. You know, finitude?  Tomorrow is Tuesday.  There's a mist susurranting all over the frosty ground and the dying earth seems so empty and still beneath the ringing stars as it spins lumbrously toward the dawn. One can feel a kind of rebirth on a global scale, signaled by the small voices of birds filling the silences with song.

I've been falling all apart lately and struggling to articulate the nuances as to why. Life, ever so-littered by obscure desires and ugly responsibilities has become frustratingly more jumbled, with all my elusive desires fraying. A knot of velvet, dragged behind a '99 Toyota Sienna.  An old football bobbing at low tide.  My therapist tells me that I'm so afraid of being wrong that I don't take enough leaps. She also says that I should take more naps. What to do with this dichotomy? 

While I finish the dishes my girlfriend wakes and bids me, not 'good morning' but to sweep the floor.  I can get so hung-up on this notion of myself as an elusive and gruesomely acidic sophisticate that it becomes an identity carved into stone and then she comes along and lifts that stone to the shelf, light as a paperweight. Everything in it's place.  Here I am. A rumple in her pillow to be fluffed and straightened.  One wonders what is her ultimate concern, what really drives her? What makes her think & act as she does? What's most deep and important to her?  She has coffee and all is put together again. Put to work. God bless her. She refuses to be deppressed.

She's not wrong.  It's work that's good for us, I've learned.  As the saying goes, "idle brain's a devil's playground."  And it is in the rote busy-ness of commonplace tasks that the stuff of life is fuelled to drive.  Embosom the familiar and find in it a source of inspiration and wonder.  Embrace the small, the concrete, and the quotidian and allow these to become vessels for the infinite.  You find out how deep the rabbit hole goes.  Pay attention to little habituations long enough and their invisible fissures begin to appear everywhere in the work as well as work's caesuras. Fractures and families of fractures going all the way down.

I remember an occassion in my quondam youth.  I was an introverted kid working the corners at my parent's party. The house full of manqué unremarkable people, (younger then than I am now) my parent's friends. Not good at much but good buddies for drinking and cavorting. Honkey Tonk Women may have been playing. How they treasured the sweep of those psalmic cadences.  I remember being bemused by their bird-lime pleasures while I stoop behind the vitrine or the swag curtains. Me in my vile yellow sweatpants and batman slippers, eavesdropping into all sorts of their fancy-schmancy-sounding disquisitions and letting my imagination bridge the gap between their increasingly drunken confidences and some mysterious Platonic ideal of worldly sophistication. "He told me his mom lived to be ninety-seven.  And she told him at the end 'I still have so many questions and no one to anwer them.'"
or 
"He's a pervert."
"Well, he's old an old pervert. At least he wasn't a pervert when he was younger."
"Some drugged by Coumadin, some drugged by lust."
"All old man are pedos, if you think about it... if they live long enough."

Anyway it was in this setting when I had my revelation.  Looking down on primordial earth and sun's refulgent rays of light and radiation cause random fluctuations that become chemical reaction: a blossoming cycle life emerges, rising in terraforming waves of ever-increasing complexity as older less efficient emergences submerge into decay. It is an arresting renewal that never rests, characters in continuous evolution. Voraciously, omnidirectionally, journeying like blind roots through the farctate fractures and folds of time, a living system of motion that culminates in the stratums of human culture in an ever-recycling process of transcending itself, the tidal flush of empires wash across the globe in retreats and mounting swells.

At work I was leading the class through their "Warren R." poetry workshops.  The wind was rattling the windowpanes.  'Warren R.' poems are anonymous eponymous topical poems. Everyone choses a broad controversy; (Environment, Gen Alpha, Relationship) and writes a poem about its undoing or destruction.  That's day one.  On day two small groups quickly pick apart the results in 10 minute speed-rounds. Poems are reassigned and re-written for day three.  What results are Warren R.: Environment, Warren R.: Relationship.  Say it out loud.  Anyway, we were talking about logical assuptions and the need for assertions that can't lose traction.   In response to the ideals of mathematics, one student said "think of the biggest number you can think of, and I can add one and make it bigger." 

I suddenly felt a stinging longing for the quiescent scent of rubiaceae.  "If Infinity is a number then perhaps Eternity is a condition." I posited aloud. They debated this for a bit.  If every thing is transient is anything? "Zeno’s paradoxes show that space can be divided up into infinitesimally smaller and smaller segments, so motion is, in a sense, impossible."
"That's why Aristotle banned infinity from Greek thought."

I let them go and move on to the next group.  They were googling the difference between zaftig and saftig.  One means plump and the other means juicy. I'm glad I got up today. Glad I didn't miss the bus.  You learn something new every day.